Cécile Pitois

Un Temps pour Tous

La Box Gallery, ENSA, Bourges / Solo exhibition – 1999
Whitechapel Gallery, London, U.K. / Group show: Open, 1996

Installation of twenty-one colored, candle wax + wick, penguins. Life-size sculptures, all lit on opening day. Exhibition visible 24 hours a day from outside the gallery through picture windows.

Duration: 648 hours / 4 weeks of uninterrupted exhibition and combustion.

0 un temps pour tous sculpture paraffine pingouins ephemere inpermanence cecile pitois artiste 1999 la box bourges
03 un temps pour tous sculpture paraffine pingouins ephemere inpermanence cecile pitois artiste 1999 la box bourges
02 un temps pour tous sculpture paraffine pingouins ephemere inpermanence cecile pitois artiste 1999 la box bourges
05 un temps pour tous sculpture paraffine pingouins ephemere inpermanence cecile pitois artiste 1999 la box bourges

Previously exhibited at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, Un Temps Pour Tous has now been brought to Bourges in its completed version, bringing together twenty-one sculptures. The wax+wick penguins are arranged in the space in such a way as to suggest that they had been following each other. The sculptures are lit just before the opening, and then burn down at random, reflecting a shared destiny that each has assumed individually. Only the penguins lying down remain unlit, thereby providing a trace of the original installation, before it all began.

06 un temps pour tous sculpture paraffine pingouins ephemere inpermanence cecile pitois artiste 1999 la box bourges
07 un temps pour tous sculpture paraffine pingouins ephemere inpermanence cecile pitois artiste 1999 la box bourges
04 un temps pour tous sculpture paraffine pingouins ephemere inpermanence cecile pitois artiste 1999 la box bourges
08 un temps pour tous sculpture paraffine pingouins ephemere inpermanence cecile pitois artiste 1999 la box bourges